Why G.O.P. Extremists Are a Danger to the Country

You think that your job and your workmates can be annoying? Put yourself in the socks of John Boehner, the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Last night, according to an account at Politico, the G.O.P. leader was reduced to standing in front of the House Republican Conference, the members of which had just torpedoed his “Plan B” tax plan, and reciting a prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Give that man another box of Camels. As Boehner faced the press this morning, and declared his willingness to keep on working for an agreement with President Obama, there were calls on the right for him to resign. For the second time in eighteen months, his colleagues have publicly humiliated him. Back in the summer of 2011, during the dispute about raising the debt ceiling, they rejected the “grand bargain” he was trying to make with President Obama and the Democrats. This time around, the G.O.P. ultras didn’t even wait until Boehner had finished negotiating with the White House to rub his face in the Capitol Hill dirt. They rejected a bill that was largely meant as a bargaining ploy. And why? Because it violated the sacred principle that under no circumstances whatsoever should tax rates go up, and it also didn’t address the issue of spending cuts.

The fact that under Plan B the increase in tax rates would have been confined to the top 0.3 per cent of tax filers counted as nothing to the G.O.P. zealots. Neither did the fact that Grover Norquist, the high priest and keeper of the pledge for the anti-tax movement, had signed off on Boehner’s proposal. And nor did the fact if the talks between the Speaker and President Obama fail, then on January 1st virtually all Americans will face a tax increase, not just those earning more than a million dollars a year. In the ideologically-driven Republican Party of today, many congressmen won’t let the family dog drown to save their wives and children. If that means that the entire family perishes, so be it. The principle is what counts.

So, where are we now on the fiscal cliff? Surprising as it might seem, not much has changed. At the start of the week, the White House and the G.O.P. leadership were pretty close to an agreement. In an attempt to gain more leverage, Boehner then tried a squeeze play—introducing Plan B—which failed disastrously. Now we are back to where we were: with the White House and the G.O.P. leadership squabbling over not very much. On taxes, the difference between the two sides is about thirty billion dollars a year; on spending, it is about twenty billion dollars a year. In the context of a $3.8 trillion federal budget, these are piddling discrepancies.

By year’s end, Obama and Boehner will almost certainly reach a deal—a fact reflected in the muted reaction on Wall Street to the failure of Plan B. At noon on Friday, the Dow was down a hundred and fifty points, or a bit more than one per cent. If investors really believed that the economy was heading over the fiscal cliff, the fall would have been much bigger. A trickier issue is whether an Obama-Boehner agreement would pass the House. With the support of the Democrats (who would have opposed Plan B) it probably would. The Republican majority is just fifty. If Boehner could garner, say, a hundred loyalists out of the two-hundred-and-forty Republican members, which even now seems possible, the agreement would pass comfortably.

The bigger issue is what the Republican obstructionism means for the next four years and beyond. There is no reason to suppose that the newly-elected House of Representatives will be any more moderate than the current one. President Obama pointed out in his press conference the other day that most G.O.P. congressman now hail from districts where he lost heavily. Such Republicans have little incentive to coöperate with the White House. The only potential challenge they face is from the Tea Party right—in the form of a potential primary battle in 2014.

To say that this doesn’t augur well for the prospects of bipartisan agreements on issues such as gun control, immigration, and tax reform is to lapse into understatement. Many of the congressmen involved in the effort to embarrass Boehner—such as Jim Jordan, the current head of the Republican Study Group, which represents over half of the G.O.P., and Steve Scalise, his successor in the new Congress—see themselves as on a mission. To heck with President Obama’s victory in November. In their minds, their reëlection to Congress gave them a mandate to uphold ultra-conservative positions, especially on those issues that bind together the conservative movement: guns, God, and taxes. Refusing to vote for a tax-raising bill, even one that would have come with many, many goodies attached for the rich, was the first step in carrying out this mission.

Fortunately, the Bush Administration’s decision back in 2001 to sunset its tax cuts robs the conservatives of leverage on this issue. Even if they were to burn Boehner at the stake, taxes on the wealthy would go up on January 1st, with or without a bipartisan agreement. But on issues like gun control, immigration, entitlement reform, and global warming—where the onus is on the reformers—the ultras may well be able to wield a veto, which would mean another two years, at least, of gridlock. With the United States facing grave problems that need addressing, that’s not good for any us.

During the past month and a half, I and many others have been thoroughly enjoying the sight of the Republican Party wriggling like an earthworm with a pin through its middle. But let’s not kid ourselves. The G.O.P. rabble in the House isn’t just a threat to Boehner, or whichever unfortunate soul might eventually succeed him as Speaker. It’s a danger to the country.